Re: git show on bare repository?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 2, 2009, 04:44 UTC
Message-ID: <20090802044402.GA21369@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <2729632a0908012051i28654bb7m418ff2ed00138815@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Aug 01, 2009 at 08:51:45PM -0700, skillzero@gmail.com wrote:

> I could have sworn I used to be able to use git show to display the
> contents of a file from the server, but now it always says this (if I
> use -- then it doesn't show anything):

It should work fine.

> fatal: ambiguous argument 'master:file.txt': unknown revision or path
> not in the working tree.
> Use '--' to separate paths from revisions

Either you don't have a 'master' ref, or the commit there doesn't have 'file.txt'. Try "git show master" and "git show master^{tree}" to see which.

It would be nice if the error were more descriptive ("master resolved, but does not contain file.txt"). The vagueness is an artifact of the way the code is structured, I think (we try a lot of different things and then barf at the toplevel, which doesn't know any of the details of how far we got into each possibility).

> What I'm trying to do is allow people to get a single file without
> having to clone the entirely repository, like this:
> 
> ssh git.example.com "cd /MyRepo.git && git show master:File.txt"

I don't know if this is a cut and past error, but you say "File" here and "file" above. That could cause the error you are seeing.

> If I do this with a non-bare repository, it works. The server is
> running git version 1.6.3.2 (I'm running 1.6.4 locally where it
> works).

The bareness of the repo shouldn't matter, as the filename is coming from the tree pointed to by 'master'. Unless it is a bug, it is probably just that the refs are different between the two repos.

-Peff